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Absolutely, women all over the world suffer from being or feeling disempowered. My argument is that the subjugation of women by different entities of patriarchal societies has been the norm for a very long time. But any being, whether male or female, if oppressed, if treated badly or is convinced that he or she is unworthy will internalize these messages and it will become part of his or her self concept, rendering the individual passive or self deprecating and unmotivated. So this response is human, not something that is endemic to women…it is an outcome. And subjugation can occur on many plains. It can start on a very fundamental level, the way your parents and your community treat you and educated you. It can be on a larger plain, on the plain of religion/dogma, politics, law; but these arenas are not divorced from or independent of the familial or communal arenas. They are in fact all symbiotic and help perpetuate one another over generations.
There are some cultures and parts of the world where subjugation seems almost to be bred. In these places it seems like people, women in this case, are living at the source of these unfortunate conditions. Well, the sin is always greater when someone else is doing it, and it’s easier to judge when you are judging someone else…there is no stack of justifications, rationalizations and denials. My point is that just because women there are clad differently and the statistics on economic equality depict a more stark disparity does NOT mean that the root issues that cause those problems preclude the structures in the “West”. Far from it.
In the US, women enjoy freedoms and safeties that many countries cannot offer them. No doubt. Women here are constantly faced with redefining the gender, redefining the expectations. But freedom of speech, expression and laws that promote equal opportunities cannot change, overnight, the prejudices…whispering sinister protests to all this progress. All it takes is a five minute walk down times square, a minute looking through a magazine, 15 seconds of television to see how the contradicting messages bombard all of us every minute.
So girls don’t know how to feel good about themselves if they don’t have a boyfriend, many women don’t know how to ask for a raise, many women don’t know how not to feel guilty when they want to work instead of being a housewife. Maybe some of them end up giving up their dreams and they stay at home, or maybe they don’t speak up when they know their husband is cheating, or as you said…they go after a man who is unavailable because they only feel woman enough when they have “won” a man.
The field of mental health has a history of struggling a lot in the insurance industry. This has mostly to do with the fact that there is usually no concrete time-frame for psychological treatment, and insurance is all about treatment plans that are water-tight and establishing limits. But therapy should naturally take time…reprogramming your thinking, unlearning certain false messages, re-loving you inner child?

A certain type of “therapy” does get more coverage for obvious reasons. In psychiatry, you give a drug to help alter the activity in a certain pathway in the brain. It either works or doesn’t, and that becomes clear within a few weeks. Then either you change the dose or try other meds. God forbid the patient is a non-responder. Both treatment and coverage get complicated then. The fact is that the meds, for some people, really help them rise above the fog, or maybe give them an oar to start getting somewhere. But for many people suffering from mental health disorders, the roots of the disease are non-biological…they are social and emotional. So essentially the medication is working at on the effect, not at the cause. These people must now use the effects of the medication to face their lives and work on the actual causes of their disease. So for complete healing, a long road is unavoidable.
Healing the condition of women in the world, resetting the status quo is a long process. Some tools (the meds) for doing this could be changes in policy, providing freedom and safety for women. But the underlying pre-programming, the poisonous, backward mentalities…those will all take time to change. Those will take individual as well as global transformation…it’s the next step on our “evolutionary track”.